Pro Street Evolution

Unlike other named trends, like rat rods and Pro Touring, it’s very easy to define a Pro Street car: It’s one with the rear wheeltubs drastically enlarged to accommodate enormously wide tires. It gets more difficult from there. Is it a street-machine-style Pro Streeter? A fairgrounds car? Or maybe something between a real street/strip car and a full-on, all-hangin’-out race car. Pro Street can be any and all of that, though there’s a fairly naturally progression of the trend, which we’ve outlined for you here. We’ve identified landmark years that correlate to the cars we’ve used as examples, and while your idea of the specific timeline may vary, this is the gist of it.

1972: NHRA Pro Stock

When Grumpy Jenkins created his first tube-chassis NHRA Pro Stock Vega in 1972, he also invented Pro Street. It was the first time that huge tires were completely tucked under a production-car body. The interest in the look had been nurtured by the flopper Funny Cars for at least six years, but Grumpy’s use of a completely fabricated tubular frame freed the restrictions of OE-style underpinnings and made it possible to run those 14-inch-wide, 32-inch-tall slicks. Badass was born. All the subsequent Pro Stockers in Ford and Mopar skins just filled in the fantasies of every kid with a muscle car.

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1979: Scott Sullivan’s Nova

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This ’67 was not the first Pro Street car, but the first to get huge attention beyond a simple car feature in a magazine. It stormed the scene in 1979, a year after the Car Craft Street Machine Nationals had been launched to huge success, creating a venue for the frenzy of Pro Street. Like all of Sullivan’s cars (see page 130), the Nova was notably tasteful for its time and had the perfect stance. It was not quite as innovative as his later work, but its detailed highlight stripe and color-matched bumpers were trendsetters. In 1984, Scott sold it to Pro Mod racer Ron Iannotti.

1980: Tubbed Street Machines

Brainwashed by images of the likes of Sullivan’s Nova in so many magazines, many street machiners of the ’70s transformed their cars for the ’80s by tubbing them into Pro Streeters. Nearly any car of this trend was back-halfed rather than using a full tube chassis, and many simply moved leaf springs inboard to fit huge meats rather than go all the way with ladder bars or a four-link and coilovers. A Roots blower poking through the hood was a signature item of Pro Streeters well into the ’90s.

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1985: Tubbed Street Rods

The July ’85 HRM cover announced the “Fat Attack!” of full-fendered street rods. One of those on the cover was Fat Jack Robinson’s ’46 Ford coupe, tubbed like a Pro Streeter. Instead, the car’s intent was real drag racing, the result of the first wave of the nostalgia drag racing trend that was hot at the time, which led to a handful of other big-tire, ’48-earlier racers. Those cars in HOT ROD led to the Pro Street look morphing into the street-rod world, and everywhere you looked, early Ford coupes and later fatties were wearing huge rubber. Sadly, FJ’s ’46 ended up wadded into a little ball at Fremont.

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1992: Fairgrounds Queens

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In 1986, Rick Dobbertin ran roughshod through the scene with his over-the-top Pontiac J2000 Pro Street show car (see page 118). His level of detail was likely never matched, but the J2000 made it OK to build cool-lookin’ if totally non-functional Pro Streeters that became known as Pro Fairgrounds, because the show venue was the only place they could really drive. The J2000 also led to a bunch of late-model, front-drive cars being converted to tube-chassis, rear-drive Fairgrounders. At the same time, the battle was on to Dare to be Different by being the first to Pro Street a car model that no one had yet seen Pro Streeted. A rebellion of normalcy would soon emerge.

1992: The C.A.R.S. Camaros

The resentment of Pro Fairgrounds cars found many street machiners wanting truly functional rides, and not just street cars, but tubbed cars that really needed wall-to-wall rubber for big traction, big wheelstands, and low e.t.’s at the drags. In Detroit and Ohio, a movement was afoot to take 8-second, all-steel, back-half drag cars, dress them in street trim, cruise them around with license plates, and race ’em heads-up and wheels-up on weekends. Some of the first that HOT ROD featured were the C.A.R.S. Inc—sponsored Camaros of Rick Dyer and Danny Scott (shown). Those cars were much of the impetus for the mag’s landmark ’92 Fastest Street Car Shootout.

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1993: Mark Tate’s Camaro

The HOT ROD Fastest Street Car Shootout was so popular so fast that it became a full race series, perhaps to its own downfall. The ostensibly streetable, heavyweight Pro Street race cars gave way to uncloaked, Pro-Stock-chassis race cars. In truth, the first Shootout winner, Max Carter’s Nova, was a tube car, but the HRM staff was too naive to care, and besides, it still looked like a real car. Mark Tate joined in 1993 with a more overt ’67 Camaro, and then Tony Christian flipped the series upside-down with this ’57. Next, Bob Reiger entered a Pro Stock S-10 truck. The appeal waned.

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2011: Modern Pro Street

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The smallest niche in the Pro Street world is that of what we call, for the lack of a better catchphrase, modern Pro Street. It’s the conglomeration of the street machine ethic, the Pro Touring show-car look, and sometimes a late-model body. Cars of this ilk are most likely to have the most modern engines, fuel injection, and turbos, and the wheels are usually 18- to 24-inchers with low-profile, superwide treads. The example here is Fastlane Motorsports’ (Benson, North Carolina) ’07 Mustang with a ’10 5.4L quad-cam engine custom fitted with an old-school 6-71 blower. It was in the Sept. ’11 HRM.

2012: Larry Larson’s Nova

Finally, all the Pro Street bogies come together: ludicrous meats, unreal quarter-mile performance, undeniable streetability, contemporary looks, and turbos with EFI. Modern tech makes it all happen in Larry Larson’s ’66 Nova that runs in the Unlimited class at HOT ROD Drag Week, the event where competitors drive 1,000-plus miles to five races in a week. Larry has run 6.90s at 200-plus mph after driving 80 mph on the highway for a week, and plenty of 7.0-second cars are chasing him. Grumpy Jenkins’ mind would be blown. Ours are.